Published: 25 January 2019
Last updated: 5 March 2024
I AM A LOVER of Jewish humour. I am also a (frequently jilted) lover of Tottenham Hotspur, the Spurs, a football team with abundant historic and geographic Jewish associations. Both of these loves entail a sense of the ridiculous, as has been apparent this past week or so.
This is not to say that each replicates the other.
Any attempt on my part to tell a Jewish joke or anecdote in my wife’s company causes her to lift her eyes to heaven. And she will answer the rhetorical enquiry, “oh, so you’ve heard it,” in the spirit of James Joyce’s: “Yes, three times a day after meals”. Yet she is totally at ease with my attachment to Spurs, although that is much more bothersome.
This is evident in the return to the headlines of the decades-old “Yid army”, and with it, the most spurious of controversies, stoked by various establishment figures, virtually all of them Jewish, virtually none of them Spurs supporters, expressing outrage at the adoption, by mainly young, non-Jewish Spurs fans, of the terms, “yiddo”, “yids” — and “Yid army”.
The latest bout of self-righteous criticism of this misunderstood phenomenon follows an outbreak of anti-Semitic behaviour among a section of fans of Chelsea football club (another recurrent event), who recently played Spurs at Wembley Stadium.
FULL STORY When Tottenham Hotspur fans chant 'Yid', it is the opposite of derogatory (Jewish Chronicle)
Photo: Tottenham Hotspur football fans (PA)
